Month: January 2016

This is the first interactive presentation of (part of) the Niobrara shale oil formation. The focus is on Weld county (CO) as most of the oil production happens there. I think one of the most interesting things from this post and the previous post, is that it looks as if the higher initial production in recent years of the typical well may not translate in higher production later on. If this proves to be the case, that would mean that there is a one-time gain production gain early on, after which the output follows the same path as wells from earlier years. Note that the production increases late in the life of 2010 & 2011 wells are likely due to refracking and other stimulation activities as wells don’t start to naturally produce more by themselves.

The 2nd analysis shows that almost half of the July 2015 production came from wells that started to produce in 2015, mostly due to the rapid declines of wells from earlier years.

Please see my previous post if you need any help with how to interact with the above presentation.

All the basic data is provided by the Colorado OGCC. This data has been analyzed, and further enriched. For example, in order to include only horizontal wells, rules were added to categorize which wells were likely to be horizontal. This classification mechanism may still have some minor errors (so some non-horizontal wells can be included in this data, while also some horizontal wells were excluded). Unfortunately I have so far not found a simpler way to make this determination.

Unfortunately I encountered more data quality issues than for ND, as I found quite regularly that monthly well production appeared to be missing. I only included wells where there were no such missing monthly data points.